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Topic: Pliny the Elder (Read 3706 times)

Hey all, New to the AHA. Just finished Bottling my Pliny the Elder Clone. I Primed with DME before bottling and OG was spot on for this recipe. Clarity was great too. Its been in bottle for 3 weeks now and I have tested 2 bottles over the past week. It has not carbonated very well at all.

Has anyone else had this happen or does the Pliny just need to really become and Elder for Carbonation? All my brews have come out really well but this is the first time I have run into this problem.

I've never used DME to carb my beer, so I can't really say anything about it, but what temp are the bottles at? I had a batch that wouldn't carb up and then I realized the ambient temp in the closet was only about 60F. Moved them to 72F living room and they carbed up no problem.

It is in the same place as all my beers at a constant 70-72 degrees. What do you use to carbonate in the bottle? I guess it was just priming sugar but it looks like DME. Either way, Im nervous to lose this batch. Taste is great but no carb really lacks the full experience. Im on the East coast so we don't get Pliny out here but I have heard great things about it. Thats why I brewed it.

All you really need is just simple table sugar for priming. If you've only used priming sugar before you'll need to adjust down a bit for table sugar. John Palmer has a great section on all of this (http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter11-4.html), and his nomograph is very easy to use and very useful (I keep a copy taped to the inside of my brew log book).

You need to use more DME vs corn sugar to prime, so if you really used DME to prime thinking it was corn sugar, then you also might end up with lower carbonation than you were expecting. Even if that was the case, I wouldn't worry about ruining the batch because it should still turn out to be tasty.